Borough Market

Where it sits. Borough Market fills a triangle of ground in Southwark between Borough High Street, Southwark Street and Stoney Street, wedged under and around the brick railway viaducts that carry trains into London Bridge station. Southwark Cathedral stands at its northern edge, the Shard rises directly above it, and the Thames is three minutes north. Trains rumble overhead constantly, which is part of the character of the place rather than a nuisance.

The story behind it. A market has traded at the southern end of London Bridge since at least the thirteenth century, and probably long before that; the traditional claim of a market here in 1014 is more folklore than record. The medieval market spread along Borough High Street and became such an obstruction that Parliament abolished it in 1755. The parishioners of St Saviour's promptly bought a patch of land called the Triangle just to the west and reopened in 1756 under a board of trustees, an arrangement that still governs the market today. Its buildings accumulated: the 1851 market hall with its wrought-iron structure, the art deco Southwark Street entrance of 1932, and, most conspicuously, the cast-iron and glass portico of the Floral Hall from Covent Garden, dismantled during the Royal Opera House rebuild and re-erected here in the early 2000s. For most of its life this was a wholesale fruit and vegetable market working through the night. The retail market as visitors know it began in the late 1990s and turned Borough into the reference point for British food markets.

On screen. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban the Leaky Cauldron moved house. Alfonso Cuarón needed the Knight Bus, a purple triple-decker, to career through London and deposit Harry outside the pub, and there was no way to drive a bus of that height into the covered arcades of Leadenhall Market, where the pub had appeared in the first film. The production instead dressed a small flower shop called Chez Michele at 7 Stoney Street, tucked beneath a railway arch on the market's south-eastern edge, as the entrance to the wizarding pub. The premises are still there and have since housed a Mexican restaurant, El Pastor. Two consecutive films therefore give the same fictional pub two different real addresses about a mile and a half apart, and neither has any interior connection to what is seen inside, which was a Leavesden set.

What you actually see today. Three overlapping markets: the Green Market under the 1851 ironwork, the Jubilee Market, and the Three Crown Square area, plus the arcades along Stoney Street and Middle Road. The stalls run to raw ingredients and prepared food in roughly equal measure — game and rare-breed butchers, cheesemongers with wheels of Montgomery cheddar and Stichelton, fishmongers, mushroom specialists, an olive oil merchant, bakeries, and long queues at the grilled cheese, salt beef and Ethiopian counters. Prices are firmly in tourist territory for cooked food and merely high for ingredients. Around the edges sit the Market Porter and the Wheatsheaf, both proper pubs, and Southwark Cathedral, free to enter, with a memorial to Shakespeare and medieval fabric worth twenty minutes. The Thameslink viaduct widening of the early 2010s cut a new brick corridor through the site and reshaped the eastern arcades, so parts of what looks Victorian are barely fifteen years old, rebuilt stone by stone to match. The market was also the scene of the London Bridge attack of June 2017; the traders reopened eleven days later, and the way Southwark treated that reopening tells you how much the place matters locally rather than touristically.

Getting there and timing. London Bridge station is two minutes away, served by the Jubilee and Northern lines and by National Rail. The full market runs Tuesday to Saturday with limited trading on Monday and a smaller Sunday offer; Friday and Saturday between noon and three are the busiest hours of the week, when moving through the arcades becomes slow work. Between nine and eleven in the morning on a weekday you can actually talk to traders and see the produce. Bring cash for a few of the smaller stalls, though cards are near-universal now. Access is level throughout, though crowded.

Nearby. The Golden Hinde replica, the ruins of Winchester Palace with its rose window, the Clink Prison Museum and Shakespeare's Globe are all along a ten-minute stretch of riverside walk west, which then leads to the Millennium Bridge — the crossing destroyed in Half-Blood Prince — putting two Harry Potter locations within a quarter of an hour of each other on foot.